Google Project Tango: Search Giant's Next Phones Will Map The Inside Of Your House

Huffington Post UK

Google has announced a new project to develop phones which will map the inside of your house, automatically.

'Project Tango' is intended to give phones full 3D awareness of their environment.

On its website Google explained that currently "our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen" - and they want that to change.

"The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.

Over the past year, our team has been working with universities, research labs, and industrial partners spanning nine countries around the world to harvest research from the last decade of work in robotics and computer vision, concentrating that technology into a unique mobile phone. Now, we’re ready to put early prototypes into the hands of developers that can imagine the possibilities and help bring those ideas into reality."

The first prototypes are going out to developers soon, in the form of a five-inch smartphone with 3D sensors able to make 250,000 measurements a second.

It envisions future devices that will incorporate Tango, and be able to build new navigation and AR apps, as well as games.

It added that there are currently 16 Tango partners, including robotics companies and Bosch. Obviously there's no word on when a device equipped with the tech will arrive, but if Project Glass - a similar developers-first initiative - is anything to go by, it could be at least a couple of years.